Slashdot Mirror
PayPal to Offer Micropayments
lazarus corporation writes "According to a press release on shareholder.com, PayPal are introducing micropayments processing fees for digital goods. Will this allow musicians to do away with record companies completely and successfully sell their own music online?" It looks geared to be the under $2 area and not the couple of pennies area, so I think calling it "Micropayments" is a bit much, but it's something. Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
Well, I am a micropayment vendor, I have built a system where you can pay just 1 cent online. It's all there, and it's all built to scale. I have someone who has committed funding to buy whatever servers are needed when the first large site signs up.
I've talked to the New York times (all the way up to the top of the company), all I got there was "We are very interested, but are working on some other things right now, so we will contact you sometime in September."
I've talked to Slashdot, who responded that they thought it was a great fit, but they were going to have to look into it more.
I've talked to Consumer Reports, who are interested, but still have to pass it around some more.
I built this system over three years ago, and have updated it numerous times (currently, it will scale as far as you want it to go). The system also allows for a universal login system so that you have a different unique ID with every site you go to (so your logins information cannot be tracked accross multiple sites). I'm even adding SOAP support so that services other than web services can use this system (say, if an online MMORPG wanted to be able to use micropayments). There is even a system in place so you can have a nag screen (The site is free, but it will bug you every 2 hours to pay money, or continue browsing for free).
The problem I have found so far, is that noone wants to be the first person in. Everyone likes the idea, and is interested in implementing it (probably gotten this response from at least 50 newspapers around the US), but they all seem scared of change. I always figured that even if you drop readership, you are making money of those that stayed, as opposed to making no money off of everyone.
Anyways, I have the site up on some shared hosting, so it's not going to be particularly fast, but it's just a demo and you can get to it here: https://www.i15h.com/
Some quick and dirty demo sites I setup are here:
http://subdemo.i15h.com/ (a simple online RSS reader, put together in 20 minutes, demonstrates online subscriptions)
http://itemdemo.i15h.com/ (a little photo gallery, where you can buy photos of feet)
If any of you want to use micropayments on your website, or know of any webmasters that might, feel free to contact me at: rob@internettollbooth.com